Initial goal of project at St. Michael’s Hospital is to make pathology images readily available to dermatologists, clinicians

Image courtesy of Carestream Health

Image courtesy of Carestream Health

November 16, 2015 — St. Michael’s Hospital, Toronto, Canada, is conducting a trial of Carestream’s new Clinical Collaboration Platform, which enables providers to identify, manage and share multi-format, multi-domain and multimodality clinical data to help clinicians make diagnostic and treatment decisions. The focus of the project is to capture and manage native pathology images within a Carestream vendor neutral archive (VNA) and enable easy access to this information by dermatologists and other clinicians on mobile devices using Carestream’s Vue Motion universal viewer.

“As a teaching hospital we often see patients with complex conditions. Our ultimate goal is to find new ways to enhance patient care. Viewing high-resolution photographic images of skin tumors or rashes is an important integrative clinical tool, and being able to see digital microscopic images of a biopsy by a treating clinician can also play an important role in diagnosis,” said Victor Tron, M.D., chief and medical director of laboratory medicine, St. Michael’s Hospital, and professor of laboratory medicine and pathobiology, University of Toronto. “We want to use this new platform to create an efficient workflow that makes these images readily available within the patient record from the EMR.”

Tron noted that clinical and pathology images are currently stored in systems that are limited to certain users. “We want to be equipped to share diagnostic information efficiently with all diagnostic and treating clinicians who need to make critical clinical decisions. Integrating other types of clinical images could also offer diagnostic benefits,” he said

Carestream’s Clinical Collaboration Platform can be deployed as modules within a provider’s existing IT ecosystem. The latest interoperability standards incorporated into the platform allow data to be aggregated to create a more holistic view of the patient record, which is accessible from any location.